New Books In Southeast Asian Studies

As any scholar of the Vietnam War can tell you, the field doesn’t lack for study: it’s one of the most-studied fields for both military and diplomatic historians. And yet, for all of the scholarly attention it has received, there are understudied facets of this complicated, multilateral conflict, particularly in its early years, before American ground troops entered the country in large numbers. Jessica Elkind’s Aid Under Fire: Nation Building and the Vietnam War (University of Kentucky Press, 2016) does precisely this by examining U.S. development programs that tried to foster a viable South Vietnamese state in the 1950s and early 1960s. The outcomes of those disparate programs ultimately deepened a U.S. commitment to the Republic of South Vietnam and helped set the United States on the road to war. Dr. Elkind’s research was conducted using U.S. government sources, private collections from Michigan State University, and South Vietnamese government sources held in Ho Chi Minh City. Michigan State University

In Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Kathlene Baldanza explores the complex diplomatic exchanges between China and Vietnam from the 13th to the 17th centuries. Drawing on vast material of both Chinese and Vietnamese primary sources, Baldanza challenges conventional narratives that focus on Chinese aggression and Vietnamese resistance, instead highlighting Vietnam’s use of East Asian classical culture as an ideological threat to China.  As such, Sino-Viet relations, read through the seven interrelated biographies covered here, should be understood as a process of negotiation and compromise. Ricarda Brosch is a curatorial assistant at the Asian Art Museum Berlin (Museum fur Asiatische Kunst Berlin Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz), which is due to reopen as part of the Humboldt Forum in 2019. You can find out more about her work by following her on Twitter @RicardaBeatrix or getting in touch via ricarda.brosch@gmail.com. Learn more about yo

“It is difficult to characterize this fascinating book,” George Tanabe writes in his short preface to The Immortals: Faces of the Incredible in Buddhist Burma (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), “Not just because it concerns thousand-year-old Burmese Buddhists who fly but also because its author has chosen, almost by necessity, unusual procedures for studying and writing about this strange topic.” Indeed. Not only Guillaume Rozenberg’s topic but also his book is itself unusual and intriguing. First published in French and now available in English thanks to the work of Ward Keeler, this is the second in a planned tetralogy on the extraordinary in Burmese Buddhism. Variously a thrilling narrative of raining coconuts and candles, a how-to guide for budding alchemists, and an account of people rendering their bodies impervious to swords and blows, at its twists and turns The Immortals also offers uncommon insights into the relationship of belief to political and social order. At the same time, it reflects frankl

In Schooling Diaspora: Women, Education, and the Overseas Chinese in British Malaya and Singapore, 1850s to 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2018), Karen Teoh relates the history of English and Chinese girls’ schools that overseas Chinese founded and attended from the 1850s to the 1960s in British Malaya and Singapore. She examines the strategies of missionaries, colonial authorities, and Chinese reformists and revolutionaries for educating girls, as well as the impact that this education had on identity formation among overseas Chinese women and larger society. These schools would help to produce what society ‘needed’, in the form of better wives and mothers, or workers and citizens of developing nation-states, while ensuring compliance with desired ideals. Chinese women in diaspora found that failing to conform to any number of state priorities could lead to social disapproval, marginalization, or even outright deportation. Through vivid oral histories, and by bridging Chinese and Southeast Asian history, B

Counterinsurgency doctrine, the Vietnam War, and the vagaries of politics all come together in Max Boot‘s latest work, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam (Liveright, 2018). One of the most prolific and iconoclastic commentators on American foreign policy currently active in American letters, Max Boot examines the life and career of General Edward Lansdale, in this detailed and quite personal biography. As he considers the various successes and failures of Lansdale’s professional life, as well as his role as the inspiration for some of the most telling fictional accounts of the Cold War in Southeast Asia, Boot also develops a context for counterinsurgency that positions strategic empathy as the most essential characteristic for its success. Yet the story of Lansdale’s life and career is also a riveting chapter in the great American tragedy that is the Vietnam War, one of which Boot offers an unvarnished and stark assessment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone

Since the 1990s, vast sums of money and time have been invested in training and resources to hold elections around the world, including in parts of Southeast Asia. The conventional wisdom is that elections either enable or consolidate democracy. Where they do not have either of these effects, the reasoning goes, it’s because the design of elections is not yet right, or conditions in which they have been held are not yet sufficiently matured as to make democracy possible. In Behind the Facade: Elections under Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia (SUNY Press, 2016), Lee Morgenbesser departs from these positions and seeks to explain why and how dictators also hold elections. Through close comparative study of Cambodia, Myanmar, and Singapore, Morgenbesser argues that even when held competitively, elections can be pliable instruments for dictators to obtain information, manage subordinates, distribute largesse and claim legitimacy. Lee Morgenbesser joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about the funct

Christopher B. Patterson‘s book Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific (Rutgers University Press, 2018) reads English-language literary production from Southeast Asia and its diasporas in North America to recognize and reveal discourses of pluralist governance. Building upon established arguments that state-sponsored multiculturalism at home justifies imperialism abroad and that state-assigned ethnic identities in Southeast Asia are vestiges of colonial pluralism, Patterson studies minor literatures of the Transpacific as a mode of creative response to pluralist govermentality. In examining these cultural communities, he finds an alternative politics of identity in their literature that express a motif of “transition.” Engaging in these ceaseless processes of transition, which Patterson dubs “Transitive Cultures,” enables individuals to maintain mobility in hyper-controlled spaces. Instead of using a national paradigm, such as “Asian-American literature,” Patterson uses the term “Tran

When the army brutally dispersed Red Shirts protestors in Bangkok’s busy commercial district in May 2010, motorcycle taxi drivers emerged as a key force, capable of playing cat-and-mouse with security forces, evading military checkpoints, and rescuing protestors and their leaders once the army attacked them. Motorcycle taxis are ubiquitous across the developing world. Dexterously weaving in and out of dense urban conurbations, they transport people, commodities and news through peak traffic with an unparalleled knowledge of the city. They are owners of the map. In his vividly etched monograph, Owners of the Map: Motorcycle Taxi Drivers, Mobility and Politics in Bangkok (University of California Press, 2017), Claudio Sopranzetti moves across the city and between city and country to examine how migrant laborers driven off the factory floor following structural adjustment reforms in the late-1990s turned to motorcycle taxi driving as a form of flexible and yet unfree means of livelihood. Owners of the Map not o

In the wake of Ken Burns’ most recent series, The Vietnam War, America’s fascination with the conflict shows no sign of abating. Fortunately the flood of popular retellings of old narratives is supplemented by a number of well-researched and reasoned efforts aimed at garnering a better sense of how our presumptions about the Vietnam War are in need of reinterpretation and revision. Returning to New Books in Military History is historian Gregory A. Daddis, author of two recent accounts of the war that together offer a sharp reassessment of the American effort. In Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing America’s Strategy in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Withdrawal: Reassessing America’s Final Years in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2017) Daddis challenges many existing perceptions of the readiness and roles of MACV’s two most prominent commanders, Generals William Westmoreland and Creighton Abrams, as well as their struggles with the Washington defense establishment during the war. By centering his st

Harrod Suarez‘s new book The Work of Mothering: Globalization and the Filipino Diaspora (University of Illinois Press, 2017) focuses on the domestic workers that make up around a third of all overseas Filipino/a workers, and whose remittances back to the Philippines contribute to about 9% of its GDP or around twenty billion dollars. These migrants circulate through the world serving in positions of nurture, care, and service. Suarez examines literary, film, and cultural representations of these figures as part and parcel of a broader historical movement that structures the Philippines under globalization. To understand the multiple sites and histories of these figures, Suarez employs a framework that he calls “the diasporic maternal,” which focuses on the various forms of care and service that these migrants occupy throughout the world. Through a reading method that Suarez calls “archipelagic reading,” Suarez attempts to trace the undercurrents of these narratives that expose the feelings, desires and strateg

In 1898, the United States took control of the Philippines from the Spanish. The U.S. then entered into a brutal war to make the Filipinos submit to the new colonial power. The war and subsequent decades of U.S. rule meant a small, but continuous presence of American soldiers on the islands, which, unsurprisingly, produced a notable population of children born to Filipino mothers and American fathers. Nicholas Trajano Molnar’s new book, American Mestizos, the Philippines, and the Malleability of Race, 1898-1961 (University of Missouri Press, 2017), examines the contested racial identities of these children. The United States brought a strong and binary sense of racial hierarchy to the discussion. Yet, as Molnar shows, Filipino understandings of race prevented a simple application of American ideas. The children were defined as American Mestizos locally, but many simply lived as Filipinos. Molnar’s book examines the ongoing contest over this mixed nationality and mixed race populations identity. By examining

Think of Christianity in Southeast Asia today and what might come to mind is the predominantly Catholic Philippines, or the work of the Baptist church among linguistic and cultural minorities in Myanmar, or any one of the thousands of Christian communities scattered throughout Indonesia. Tam T. T. Ngo‘s new book is about none of these relatively familiar groups and places, but instead about the quite recent emergence and rather rapid growth of evangelical Christianity among the Hmong in the upland areas of Vietnam, on the border of China. Her The New Way: Protestantism and the Hmong in Vietnam (University of Washington Press, 2016) is the first ethnography of Christian conversion in the borderlands of one of the only two formally communist states remaining in Southeast Asia today. Not only is the book remarkable for its collection and use of hard-to-get data from a wide array of sources in Vietnam and abroad, including extended periods of fieldwork in a Hmong village, but also for the story it recounts of con

The work of sociologist Norbert Elias has had a renaissance in recent times, with Steven Pinker, among others, using it to argue that interpersonal violence has declined globally as states have expanded and subdued restless populations. In Violence and the Civilising Process in Cambodia (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Roderic Broadhurst and his co-authors Thierry and Brigette Bouhours bring the declinist thesis to Southeast Asia. Coupling Elias’s approach with criminological theory, Broadhurst and the Bouhours argue that Cambodia’s experience over a 150 years is broadly consistent with what Elias found in Europe: that by monopolising force, generating chains of interdependence, and sensitising people to violence, states have an overall civilising effect. This is a startling and counterintuitive finding for a country whose name was not so long ago synonymous with genocide. But, Broadhurst and co-authors explain, the civilizing process is not linear. Asia like Europe has had its decivilising periods, and it

The government of the Philippines has for decades encouraged its citizens to seek work abroad and send money back to the country in remittances. But in recent years it has increasingly sought to entice Filipinos who have settled abroad to come home, not only for tourism but also for retirement. In Migrant Returns: Manila, Development, and Transnational Connectivity (Duke University Press, 2017), Eric J. Pido travels with Filipino Americans as they try to reimagine their lives and lifestyles in the gated communities and malls of Manila, and beyond. Along the way he encounters real estate agents, bureaucrats, investors and family members of returnees, or balikbayan, all in one way or another participating in attempts at selling an idea of home, one that for balikbayan from the US in particular evokes feelings both of homecoming and of a homeliness that they associate with their years spent on the other side of the Pacific. Eric J. Pido joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about histories of depar

Billed as “an exploration of the role of nationalist imaginings, discourses, and narratives in Cambodia since the 1993 reintroduction of a multiparty democratic system,” Cambodia’s Second Kingdom: Nation, Imagination, and Democracy (Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 2016) pays special attention to how competing nationalistic imaginings are a prominent part of contestation in the country’s post-war reconstruction politics. These imaginings, the book’s author Astrid Noren-Nilsson argues, constitute resources with which parties obtain popular support and win elections. In making her case, she draws on an impressive array of primary sources, including extensive interview data with members of Cambodia’s political elite. Duncan McCargo speaks with Astrid Noren-Nilsson for New Books in Southeast Asian Studies on the sidelines of the 2017 EuroSEAS conference at the University of Oxford, where Cambodia’s Second Kingdom was shortlisted for the EuroSEAS social science book prize. You may also be interested in: Sophal E

The relationship between religion and economic activity has attracted generations of scholars working in myriad settings. In recent years, many have turned to questions of how Islamic ideas are generative of economic activity, to Islamic finance and capital, and to the relationship between contemporary Islam and capitalism more broadly. In Corporate Islam: Sharia and the Modern Workplace (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Patricia Sloane-White builds on this work by asking “not only how the spread of global capitalism transforms the lives of Muslims… but how capitalism empowers the spread of Islam.” Drawing from interviews and ethnographic fieldwork over a seven-year period, and a wealth of knowledge from over two decades of research in Malaysia, Sloane-White argues that the “sharia space” of the today’s corporate Islamic workplace is a third domain between the public and the private in which employees must submit to the guidance of their professional and personal lives by men who insist that their businesse

Recent years have seen an upsurge in studies asking questions about, and in, borderlands. The topic is certainly not new to scholars of mainland Southeast Asia, but as Bradley Camp Davis shows in Imperial Bandits: Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands (University of Washington Press, 2017), plenty of work remains to be done on the parallel processes of border and state formation in the region. Drawing on Chinese, Vietnamese and French written sources as well as hundreds of interviews with villagers in the uplands of Yunnan and northern Vietnam, Davis tells the story of a half-century of violence, trade and taxation at the hands of competing armed groups; of their alliances and wars with lowland states, and of the bandit as symbol in nationalist and local histories and memorials today. Bradley Camp Davis joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss the malleability of bandits and banditry, Black Flags and Yellow Flags, the merits of oral traditions in study of history, and the place of

The conquest of the Philippines in 1942 brought thousands of Americans under the control of the empire of Japan. While most of them were interned or imprisoned for the duration of the war, a remarkable few evaded capture and fought on against the Japanese. In MacArthur’s Spies: The Soldier, the Singer, and the Spymaster Who Defied the Japanese in World War II (Viking, 2017), Peter Eisner describes the efforts of three of them John Boone, Claire Phillips, and Chick Parsons to incite an insurgency against the Japanese occupation. Facing long odds, they risked their lives to undermine Japan’s control, with Claire’s Manila nightclub supplying resources and information to Boone in the nearby countryside and the intelligence passed on to Chick and other officers working towards America’s return to the Philippines. Their efforts in association with that of others provided American and Filipino guerrillas with much-needed material, and smuggled in food and supplies to thousands of prisoners of war the Japanese held o

Now and then we feature a book on New Books in Southeast Asian Studies whose author we ought to have had on the show some time ago. The Perfect Business? Anti-Trafficking and the Sex Trade Along the Mekong (University of Hawaii Press, 2012) is one such book. Sverre Molland wrote his tandem ethnography of traffickers and anti-traffickers while researching on the border of Thailand and Laos in the 2000s, after a stint in an anti-trafficking project in which the incongruities of identifying and criminalizing alleged human traffickers became all too obvious to him. Bringing an anthropological lens to the juridical and economic categories that are usually deployed both to explain and address the phenomenon of trafficking for sex, Molland shows that the premises on which anti-trafficking programs operate are unsound. The movement of women and girls in and out of the sex trade is deeply socially embedded. Only by attending to the many varied ways that recruitment into the trade occurs can it be understood. With that

If you’ve been hospitalized in Europe, North America, Australia or the Middle East in recent years, chances are that at some point a nurse from the Philippines has had some part in your treatment. As Megha Amrith writes in the introduction to Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia (NIAS Press, 2017), Filipinos today comprise one of the largest global diasporas of medical workers, with the Philippines having over 400 nursing colleges, many of them aimed primarily at preparing graduates for work abroad. But as the book’s subtitle indicates, it is a diaspora that stretches not only beyond but also across Asia. And whereas other studies have looked at the political economy of care in the West, Caring for Strangers is an ethnographic exploration of Filipino medical workers in Singapore. The story it tells is one of a community of women, and a few men, occupying an ambiguous space somewhere in-between their local counterparts on the one hand and tens of thousands of unskilled Filipino migrant worker